Dirty Politics

I find myself getting impatient with the endless chatter about the legal and technical minutiae of some aspects of Hager's book because the essence of it is abuse of trust and betrayal of democracy. These are issues that, if not resolved properly, will further polarise the country – into rich and poor, left and right, north and south.

It has definitely polarised journalists. Any media person who wants to be taken seriously (by anyone with intellect and integrity)  should have demanded National take these allegations on board and investigate them – and dug deeper into many of them. Anything less is a complete abrogation of everything a journalist is supposed to be.

Talking heads like Hoskings and Henry are so light weight and so transparently right wing I expect nothing more from them. I expect nothing better from ex-Radio NZ journalist turned Radio Live host, Sean Plunket, who has slipped into his role as a lightweight, right wing gap filler between noisome advertisements as if it had been tailor-made for him.

But Radio NZ is a different matter – it has to be ethical high ground of broadcasting. We expect intelligent, informed, hard hitting but scrupulously even-handed journalism. 

Guyon Espiner's interview of David Cunliffe on Morning Report on August 14th was a shameful breach of that trust especially as he had just given National politician Stephen Joyce an easy ride.  RNZ staff are now being more measured in tone and manner and are taking great care to carefully spell out the political allegiances of all people they interview but August 26th's interview suggests that Espiner is incapable of interviewing Cunliffe without falling into a hectoring and personalised style.

One question I ask myself – and all journalists worthy of the name should be asking – is why didn't Key do the statesmanlike thing and say something along the lines of : "we dispute these allegations obviously but we take them seriously and will investigate them thoroughly because we want to prove to all New Zealanders that they can trust us, that we are above this sort of dirty politicking."

Another question I ask myself is how would this be playing out if the political shoe was on the other foot?

The answer to the first is pretty obvious – National has been engaging in the two-track strategy that Hager describes and can't own up to the dirty tricks element of it without scuppering the squeaky clean "President Key" element. It might also be that, having given the likes of Slater, Collins and Lusk the approval to engage in filthy politicking, Key has unleashed something he can't control.

The answer to the second is that those sections of the mainstream media, which are turning themselves inside out to deny, divert and deflect the issue away from Team Key and back onto Hager and the Left, no longer try to maintain even the pretence of journalistic integrity. They spin innocuous and tangential issues into controversies to embarrass, confuse and divide the left - and to whip up moral panics amongst voters with hair-trigger responses to certain issues.

The double standard that has been operating more and more overtly in the media is now so glaringly obvious that even a dumbed down / cowed / bribed / confused / disheartened populace must surely realise it's beyond time to wake up and take sides.

You either side with the right on this issue and argue all that matters is winning, even if the race is a complete sham, or you stand up for those core values all Kiwis are supposed to hold dear - egalitarianism, natural justice, and common decency.

I know that these took a terrible beating when the neo-libs hi-jacked Labour and took over the economy in the 1980s and bought the Kiwi soul for a handful of baubles with built in obsolescence – but some vestiges are still there.

I grew up with them but when I came back here after 28 years away I was horrified at the shallow, brittle selfishness of so many Kiwis.  It didn't feel like my country any more. I would rather be that slightly shabby, socially awkward, shy but decent and honest to the core nation which is the idealised image I have of the NZ in which I grew up, than this polarised, unfair, mercenary little shit hole it is fast becoming.  I know old NZ had its ugly side but why haven't we dispensed with that and kept the decent bits – instead of the other way around?

This episode has made me ashamed for the second time in my life to be a New Zealander.  The first was when I read the disgusting attacks on Helen Clark in the lead up to the 2008 election. I was critical of her policies and politics for many reasons but the viciousness and cruelty of the attacks on her shocked me to the core, and I'm no shrinking violet.

NZ has become a country where the term "do-gooder" is used as a pejorative. People who care about and try to protect animals, forests, rivers and the ocean, are mocked and detested and labelled as more dangerous to the common good than callous and heedless exploiters and despoilers.

Kind, empathetic people are derided as  "bleeding heart liberals".

The singularity of the individual people who make up the  "poor"  is masked by the irremovable label of "benefit bludger".

Popular commentators can call poor people the "feral underclass" and make public calls for their sterilisation and be feted for it.

A conspiracy to influence candidate selection in the National Party to take it further to the far-right is uncovered and it is almost completely ignored.

An unscrupulous bully makes a most cruelly insensitive comment about a personal tragedy and is given a media award. Many of his fan base thought his ugly comment was funny.

The same person is shown to have engaged in filthy politics, and a large number of Kiwis including members of the government and the Prime Minister can happily live with that and excuse it as just the normal rough and tumble of political life.

It is not. It is all corrosive and destructive;  it harms people and it dissolves the glue that binds us together as a society. It is unacceptable on every level and by every civilised standard.

The issues raised in Dirty Politics won't go away.

The Great Race

There is a widespread belief that all the poor are poor because of the bad choices they make, which is as absurd as arguing that all the rich are rich because of their good choices.

Arguing that we can choose what level of wealth we want and acquire / retain is either an expression of extreme naivety and ignorance of both contemporary reality and history, or, it’s the work of a Troll. 

(Troll is an acronym for "thick, rightwing, obnoxious, loudmouthed lout", or – the Type II variant – a "two-faced, rightwing, opinionated, labrynthine liar". The latter is far more annoying because they crave attention and will even self-flagellate in order to get people to take notice of them.)

There can be no equality of choice without genuine equality of opportunity and there can be no genuine equality of opportunity because the  system cannot tolerate it.

The simple, inescapable fact is that the capitalist system is based on a fundamental inequality. The only way those who lack economic and / or political power can force positive change is in combination with others to change the system – and history is littered with the evidence of the use of the State by the powerful to prevent the powerless from combining to force change.

The rich and powerful used to argue that god gave them their wealth and power but the pesky little notion of human rights pretty much put the kibosh on that and so the ideology of the ‘meritocracy’ was born. We have the same grossly unequal division of wealth and status but it is justified on the grounds that the rich and powerful are more meritorious or deserving because they are more talented, hard working, better educated etc. They make GOOD CHOICES.

The flip side of that dirty little coin is the notion that the poor are less deserving because they are stupid, feckless, lazy etc. They make BAD CHOICES.

The simple, inescapable fact is that the global capitalist system does not and cannot accommodate ALL people being rich – or even ALL people being well off.  It creates and perpetuates a global class of poor because it needs it.

The poor are of course not homogenous – there are degrees of poverty. In relatively affluent NZ we have very few utterly poor people but a growing number of relatively poor. Most working people are kept afloat by credit extended to them by foreign owned banks which gouge profits out of their debtors, and our relative affluence rests on a vast pool of impoverished people in other countries. The presence of the world's utterly poor are a reminder to the relatively poor of countries like ours what might happen to them if they challenge the definition of success or seek to sabotage the Great Race.

Capitalism sets up a continuous and compulsory "race" to what it defines as "success" – i.e., the accumulation of private wealth in the form of money, land and things. The higher placed you are in the race, the more wealthy you get and the more status, things and advantages you can buy.

By any objective measure, the accumulation of more wealth and things than one can ever need or sensibly use may be said to be the very opposite of "success". It may in fact be said to be a symptom of a highly disordered or poorly formed personality – an extreme form of "hoarding".  It is very telling that, in a poor person, hoarding is judged to be pathological; in a rich person, it’s judged to be a virtue.

There is a cabal of people whose function it is to present the "race to success" as both essential, desirable and inherently fair, i.e., to skew reality.

A key part of their function is the portrayal of those who have won the race so often they now don’t need to run at all but just collect their winnings, and those who are in the process of winning or being well placed – as being more talented, skilled, harder working. These people are deemed to have made GOOD CHOICES.

These lackeys also have the job of portraying those who always trail in last, don’t make the finish line or can’t even get to the start line, as being less talented, lazy, feckless, to have wasted their time watching tele instead of training or traded in their running shoes for fags and booze etc etc.  These are the people who have made BAD CHOICES.

An example of the pernicious work of these lackeys is the labelling of the so-called feral underclass. These people are so much consigned to the realms of the barely human, they don't have children, they breed or spawn, and Neo-fascist commentators can call for their sterilisation and not only keep their jobs, but be feted for their perspicacity and courage for "telling it like it is."

The system's lackeys have to do this sort of thing to disguise the rather obvious fact that the tiny minority of the most advantaged people – the global elite – either don't have to run the race at all or they get to jog along on wide, smooth, level inside lanes.

In contrast, the outer lanes not only become progressively more crowded with runners, they get more steeply cambered, narrow and uneven.

What makes the race even more inequitable is that the start is not staggered to allow for the far longer distances of the outer lanes. 

Grossly and intrinsically unfair though it is, if the outer lane runners complain or combine to boycott the race until it is made more fair – or – worst sin of all – question the rationale of the race itself – they will find themselves pushed even further back from the start line or forced to run in hobbles or blind folded. They may even be banned from the race entirely and join the ranks of the utterly poor whose only function is to remind the relatively poor of what might happen to them if they don’t keep running in their allotted lanes.

Of course, a few of the middle lane runners manage to elbow and barge their way onto the inner tracks, and a tiny number on the outer tracks get well placed by virtue of extraordinary talent or extreme viciousness or sheer luck. These few exceptions are highlighted by the lackeys to add weight to the lie that where you get to run and where you are placed is down to the CHOICES you make.

But the fact is that, however hard those in the middle and outer lanes run, most of them can never win or even be placed. Some of the middle lane runners console themselves with the thought that at least they are beating all the deadbeats crammed into the outer most lanes. They know that the innermost lanes are reserved for the exclusive use of the elite – as it has always been – and may know deep in their hearts that it is both grossly unfair and morally indefensible but, instead of protesting the unfairness, some of them get quite brutal in their defence of it and turn on those with fewer advantages than them. 

This of course helps the global elite who continue to glide along on the smooth path of privilege  secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the disadvantaged are being kept busy blaming and beating up on each other. 

Fee fie foe fit, I smell the stench of a hypocrite ….

These head lines on Yahoo!Xtra yesterday just about sum up the world we live in.

"Kate Middelton's brother making edible selfies" – the clever little chap has set up a business printing Instagram snaps on marshmallows.

And: 

"Australian Boy in shocking Syrian picture" – a young boy, reportedly the son of an Australian jihadist in Syria, is seen posing with a Syrian soldier's head. 

The story is that Syrian government soldiers captured by the Islamic State jihadists are beheaded and their heads are impaled on fences and used as props in pictures that the righteous upholders of Islam post on Twitter and Facebook.  

It's funny how these maniacal anti-westerners are so into western media and imagery,  eg. images of them posing, legs spread, in front of a dick extension (car) holding a dick extension (gun) in each hand – how much more junk-American could you get?

I detest all men of violence and all proselytising religious fundamentalists but I especially detest the sociopaths who cynically manipulate them. 

So, why are we suddenly seeing these horrifying images splashed all over the internet (on some Christian fundy sites they're shown in all their gory glory, on MSM sites the heads are tastefully blocked out)?

Could it be to do with the Australian government's plans to introduce changes to the anti-terrorism laws, – i.e. "broaden the listing criteria for terrorist organisations, lower the threshold for arrest without warrant for terrorism offences, extend police and intelligence agencies’ powers to stop, question and detain suspects, and make it easier for the Australian federal police to seek control orders on people returning from fighting abroad."

The Muslim community in Australia is justifiably appalled at the implications of these changes which target Muslims, so how very useful to have proof of Australian jihadists involved in heinous war crimes in Syria.

The stench of hypocrisy is unbearable. 

Economy, effectiveness and efficiency - yeah Right

So - Gary Romano who took the fall for the Fonterra botulism scare was head hunted by Shanghai Penguin – the company which bought the Crafar farms (the original purchase of which was financed by loans made to Crafar by Fonterra) and which are managed by the huge State Owned Enterprise  Landcorp which is planning to move out of direct land ownership into land management in partnership with the private sector.

A NZ Herald finance pundit says in March:  

"Don't read from this that Pengxin is about to rapidly ramp up its operations in New Zealand anytime soon to form itself into a vertically integrated competitor to Fonterra. The company is more likely to look across the Tasman where Chinese investment in the sector is stepping up in advance of expectations that a bilateral free trade agreement will be notched between Australia and China."

Hmm - this is the company which has majority holding in the Synlait farms in Canterbury 

which included being given conservation land.

At present this company with no plans "anytime soon to form itself into a vertically integrated competitor to Fonterra" has a deal in train to buy the 14000 hectare Lochinver Station in the central North Island which the Nats support.

Just as the warmongers in Israel launch the accusation of anti-semitism against who criticises their lunatic actions, the National Government in NZ launches the accusation of "xenophobia" against anyone who criticises their lunatic short-termism which is nowhere more obvious than in the sale of vast tracts of dairy land to an offshore competitor to the "industry" which has been allowed to become the foundation of our economy. 

A Parable For Our Times: with apologies to real sharks

Just so we are all on the same page - this is a parable based on the Kim Dot-Com situation


Once upon a time there was a little shark who wanted to be a Great White when he grew up. Because he was a clever and devious hunter he grew to be a very big little shark.  He was not content to dominate the sharks in his part of the ocean and set off towards the zone of the Great Whites – the shark elite whose ranks he thought he was big enough and vicious enough to join. 

This elite of Great Whites allows certain other smaller sharks to scavenge the edges of their kill zone and if they are well fed, they may even let an enterprising little shark dart in to seize some prey for itself, but if a little shark starts to act like one of the Great Whites, or threatens their interests, they'll turn on him.  

The big little shark desperately wanted to be a part of the Great White elite but to them he was just a scavenging pest. When he started to muscle in on their kill zones, they decided to destroy him. He managed to escape and fled south but they were in a blood frenzy and pursued him across the oceans as far as the great southern ocean where he found some quiet waters in which to rest and gather his strength. 

The local sharks seemed a pretty dopey bunch and were easily bribed with a few fish to let him take up residence in their waters. Once rested, he took to his usual tactic of scattering around large amounts of fish offal to boost his reputation as the biggest predator in the neighbourhood and managed to gather a number of scavengers around him.  

But, unbeknownst to him, there was a Great White in residence – cleverly disguised as a dolphin. This shark in a dolphin suit alerted the Great White elite to the big little shark's presence in his waters, and a kill squad was sent to finish him off.

Using all his skills, the big little shark managed to escape the kill squads and found himself a spot where he could defend himself.  He thought that if the Great White elite was never going to let him become one of them he would be as much of a nuisance to them as he could – especially to the resident Great White.  

He looked around for allies. There weren't many as the waters had been so depleted of fish they could not support much in the way of predators, but he managed to find some prey species which were swimming around in an agitated and fearful state. 

He devised a cunning plan. He also disguised himself as a dolphin (a very large one it must be said) and persuaded the prey fish that he and his dolphin school would protect them from the Great White and its gang of scavengers if the prey fish would act as a diversion. They were to present themselves as a target while he and his school would sneak up behind the Great White and ram him – that being the way dolphins attack sharks.  Once deprived of their devious leader, the scavenger gang could be chased away by the dolphins and all would be well. 

The fish were so anxious for some leadership they totally forgot to question how come this particular dolphin had such huge teeth, not to mention the fact that dolphins also eat fish. 

After a lot of discussion, the prey fish agreed to band together to create a big enough shoal to attract the resident Great White's attention. The Great White duly sniffed out the prey and headed in for the kill. To the horror of the fish there was no sign of their dolphin protector.  Once the Great White had killed and eaten as many of the fish as he could catch and his scavengers had finished off the rest, he turned and found himself confronting the big-little shark.

"That was my gift to you," the big little shark said. "Proof of my good intentions. I want to stay here in these waters and if you let me I can promise you more prey, especially lots of tasty young juveniles. They can see right through your disguise because frankly it's wearing a bit thin, but they think I'm a real dolphin."

The Great White thought a while and being a very pragmatic sort of shark who didn't get to where he was by useless displays of overt aggression, agreed to let the big little shark stay, as long as he delivered a regular tribute of the tasty young prey he'd promised. 

And if he became too much of a nuisance, the resident Great White thought, there is more than one way to kill a shark.

The End.

Project Persephone - an exercise in futility

I was very diverted by a story I read in dePress on Tuesday about the Persephone Project. 

An international group of scientists is working on the development of the bio-technologies necessary to create a self-sustaining space ship which will save some people if (when) the greedheads and their minions manage to make Earth a "no-go zone for human beings due to..." – wait for it – "climate change or nuclear or biological warfare."

The team's sociologist, who made the above breath-taking statement, seems oblivious to the fact that investment in the sort of bio-technologies necessary to create a mini planet is the sort of investment which, multiplied many fold, might just save the big planet we evolved on.  

The idea is that, within a 100 years, Earth will be uninhabitable for humans – and by logical extension – most other species. In order to preserve the species which brought about this dreadful state of affairs, a few thousand select humans will be launched into space aboard a "Space Ark" to find another planet to colonise.

Given the sort of people who would be selected for such an Ark – the greedheads' "flower of humanity" would be my noxious weeds  – one can surmise they'd pretty soon ruin that planet as well.

The people involved in the project are clearly incapable of comprehending the enormity of the insult inherent in their acceptance of the inevitability of the Earth's demise and the pipe dream of building a self-sustaining "life raft".  They can dream about as yet impossible bio-technologies to save a few thousand of the elite but are unable to envisage the comparatively simple reorganisation of the relations of production and reproduction in sustainable and equitable ways so that we can save the planet we all live on. 

One accepts this from the greedheads; such is the narcissistic hubris of the forces which govern us, they would rather destroy the planet and most of what lives on it than admit their miserable life-negating philosophy is wrong.

But, scientists signing up for the bullshit is a reminder that of all that trickles down from the elite, it's that life negating, narcissistic hubris which is the most prolific and toxic.

Polemic or propaganda?

A polemic is a strongly worded expression of controversial views. I make no apology for this being a leftwing polemic because we are drowning in a morass of rightwing polemic disguised as news. Every time there is a headline which squawks about '"benefit cheats'" – that's a rightwing polemic disguised as neutral commentary. If you find the strong statement of political views to be upsetting, I suggest you stop reading now.

The thing is, we need something to fight for; there's not much value in fighting against something if we don't know or agree on what to replace it with. The right wing all over the developed world have all but destroyed both the belief that there is a better way to organise society and what are the best means by which to achieve it. They have convinced people that a "free market" driven by the profit motive is the only or is the best engine of progress; that creativity, productivity and innovation need the spark provided by the profit motive, i.e. that without the profit motive we would still be living in caves or mud huts. 

They obscure the fact that the market is not and never can be truly free because an uncontrolled drive for privatised profit is completely incompatible with balanced, sustainable production. I'd also argue that it's incompatible with balanced, sustainable reproduction.

Too many people in the developed world have accepted the bribe of increased consumer "choice" in the form of masses of cheap, intrinsically obsolete products. They close their eyes to the fact that these products are made cheap by the relocation of capital to parts of the world where labour and life have been kept or made cheap.  

The first action of all the governments which implemented monetarist economic theory was to remove all controls on the export of capital. This undermined organised labour at home, and allowed the free movement of capital to places where wages and working conditions were already low or could easily be forced down – i.e. where labour was not organised and could be kept that way. 

We forget, choose to ignore, or have never been taught that, the first victims of industrial capitalism were pauper women and children in the mines and mills of the industrial heartlands of Great Britain; that industrial capitalism was funded by industrialised slavery and the theft of other peoples' lands, and that domestic paupers were created by the misappropriation of common land and the callous eviction of millions of its occupants. 

Because of pressure from workers and other progressive elements, industrial capitalism had to yield concessions – to ameliorate its worst excesses. These concessions reached a peak in the decades following WW2 but since corporate and finance capitalism regained the ascendancy in the 1980s, the economic predators have had increasing freedom to sniff out sources of new high-yield victims in the form of the paupers of the Third World. 

These workers often labour for a pittance in appalling conditions to produce the commodities which are sold to (and used to mesmerise) the increasingly unproductive consumers of the First World. The tragic irony is that many of these First World consumers are either already paupers, about to become paupers, or are kept afloat by using their credit cards as flotation aids and paying obscene interest rates to the banksters for the privilege.

How ironic is it, that we, in the relatively privileged zones of the world, are conned and diverted by the very technology that enables the banksters and all their collaborators and supporters in business and government, to create the vast VIRTUAL wealth that buys and wields REAL power and the surveillance systems which allow them target that power. 

Ask yourself, whose interests do the masked men in the identikit uniforms protect? We are told they are there to fight crime and terrorism but that is more right wing polemic; the militarisation and homogeneity of the world's police is a calculated strategy – they are there to fight the inevitable insurgency as the contradictions widen and deepen. 

Anyone with sense, with any shred of understanding must realise that the way things are currently organised is unsustainable; that the people running the world are the most wilfully destructive predators the planet has ever seen.  Their philosophy, or rather the soulless strategising that passes for a philosophy, is, if they can't have it all, no one shall have any.  

Fortunately for the planet, not all humans are wilfully destructive predators but if the majority of us leave the power in the hands of the minority of sociopathic predators – we're all toast.  

We simply have to ask ourselves, do we want a world in which millions of children die for want of basic food, medicine and clean water? Where millions of small children are forced to work in sweat shops, trafficked as domestic and sex slaves, denied the basic human rights of shelter, security and education? 

Can we live with the obscenity of the children of the world's elite possessing wardrobes of thousands of high price items manufactured in countries which permit the hyper-exploitation of poor labourers and their children? 

Can we live with the obscenity of a world which is squandering precious and irreplaceable natural resources on the production of consumables with built-in obsolescence that are used mainly for the exchange of vain and useless information, the substitution of nostalgic banalities for knowledge and insight, and the masking of the indescribably awful with cyber-floss and smiley faces?  

Can we live with the obscenity of a world in which the poor of the developed zones are suffering and dying from a constellation of metabolic disorders created by eating and drinking the products of mad experiments in food production, while the children of the less developed world die of starvation?  

I know it sounds like hyperbole, but both the social and natural worlds are on the cusp of becoming chaotic. 

All organisms and communities of organisms strive for homeostasis – which is a state of relative equilibrium between interdependent elements. Too far out of equilibrium and/or for too long, and the organism/s will suffer irreparable damage, i.e. there is a point at which chaos ensues – and all bets are off because we simply do not know for certain how any given organism or collectivity of organisms may react once the tipping point is reached. 

How hopelessly inadequate are we in predicting how the planet and the totality of the organisms that live on it will react as homeostasis is more and more difficult to achieve?  

Okay, so this is all very misery-inducing and we all need light relief, I get that, even old serious socks like me need to lighten up and laugh. But we need to know that we have been herded into a virtual corral. We're like horses behind electric tape – once zapped by an electric fence most horses will stay penned behind a thin piece of wire, some may even die of starvation behind it. Pigs are different – give them a gap big enough and they will often barge under or through knowing they'll get zapped but also knowing that it's a momentary discomfort and it's a price worth paying for the freedom on the other side.

So, it's over to each person to make a decision. As individuals we cannot change the world but in combination with other people we can change our own towns, cities and countries. Each small progressive change supports other small progressive changes. Quite literally the world depends on it.